I’ve been preparing for the past few months to take the Zend certification for PHP. However I’ve been busy as well with client projects but I plan to take it this year. Here is an interesting chart on the growth of PHP Certified Developers through the years. The growth of PHP developers have been phenomenal due to developing applications on open source environment LAMP(Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) has always been cheaper alternative, but with the numbers of PHP developers growing there has not been a significant growth for those getting themselves PHP certified.

Here is a slide chart courtesy from a research made by Prof. Mauricio Garcia F. Nascimento from Sao Paulo

With the U.S. leading with 1,047 PHP Certified Developers based on 2009.

And from 2004-2008 only 15 are PHP Certified from the Philippines. I want to belong in that company soon this year. So back to studying again.

Microsoft and Yahoo! finally closed their web deal which will make Microsoft’s Bing the algorithm to power the Yahoo! search engine. The long rumor is now over and the deal is set for 10 years. This positions both companies to target the search king Google. Yahoo! last year was on a brink of being bought by Microsoft but with this new deal no takeover is happening. Yahoo is next to ranking on search from Google, by Microsoft tying a deal with Yahoo it brings them much closer to Google.

Yahoo will keep 88% of the ad revenues for the first 5 years and have rights to sell ads as well on some Microsoft sites and brands.

Since posting last July 22 that I noticed my pagerank vanished and only showed as “No PageRank Information Available”, after doing some investigation on my files I saw that I had an empty robot.txt file, so I added the allow tag back. This could be the culprit,Â it could have caused googlebots to not crawl the site.Â Now I need to investigate why my robot.txt suddenly became empty. Anyway thanks google for giving back my PR 3/10.

Have you ever thought about using fonts as a viral tool for marketing your new product? Well apparently in Belguim, Toyota did. They released a new car called Toyota iQ which is a compact car, hired a couple of designers to do the typeface and a pro racecar driver. Had the driver spin the car around in letter patterns.
Check out this video:

Google definitely has alot of tricks rolled up their sleeves, the upcoming Google Chrome OS announced last two weeks ago, which they target to roll out prebundled with netbooks next year. Here is an upcoming online tool that I’m anxious to try – Google Wave which was announced earlier and planned to be released within this year.

Quoted from Google:

Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web

How does it work?

In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content â€” it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

Being a freelance web designer and developer this kind of tool is something I can use, Currently I use BaseCamp for Project Management and like it.